Snyder made a few noises Thursday about freedom of choice for workers and feeling competitive pressure from Indiana's recent embrace of right-to-work, but I suspect his flip-flop was mostly out of frustration.

Frustration with labor as an impediment rather than a partner in fixing Michigan.

And frustration with himself for his naïveté in not realizing it earlier.

Public employee unions opposed Snyder's moves to put more teeth into emergency manager laws that would enable swifter action to rescue cities and school districts that bungled themselves into insolvency.

In Detroit, Mayor Dave Bing and a spineless City Council were stonewalled by employee unions at every turn, slow-walking needed reforms and cost-cutting while the city burned through cash at a frightening rate.

As a result, Snyder's patient attempt to help fix Detroit via consent agreement instead of imposing an emergency manager has failed.

To top it off, Snyder found himself having to fight off Proposal 2, the ill-advised November ballot attempt to stuff a bag of goodies for organized labor into the Michigan Constitution.

From the unions in weeks to come, we will hear boisterous rhetoric about Snyder and GOP legislators declaring war on the middle class, about right-to-work being a greedy ploy by rich bosses to strip the rank-and-file of a voice to bargain fair wages and working conditions.

Fair enough -- there should be a vigorous debate about the likely impact of right-to-work on job creation, income levels, etc.

But what this nation does not lack, and hasn't lacked since the 1930s, is freedom for workers to make choices about unionizing. Right-to-work language about compulsory union membership is more about leverage than basic human rights.

Unfortunately for organized labor, ever since 1954, more and more workers have chosen not to be represented by unions. In the mid-1950s union penetration was nearly 35% of U.S. jobs. Now it's about one-third of that, and only about 7% of private sector workers. Michigan has a higher ratio of unionization than the U.S. average, but the gap has been shrinking.

The UAW may fret that foreign-owned auto factories are nonunion in right-to-work states, including Alabama, Mississippi and Texas, but the union must also look in the mirror and ask why it has failed to organize Honda and Toyota plants in non-right-to-work states, such as Ohio and Kentucky.

This tussle over right-to-work in Michigan will not be so much a battle of Good vs. Evil, as much as a sign of the times.

Times in which capital, goods, services, companies and labor are more mobile than they have ever been.

Times in which fiefdoms cannot be shielded from market forces, and unions must be accountable for their performance just as corporate CEOs or sports team coaches are.

The message here: No more dithering.

No more dithering by Snyder when decisive action is needed. "We still have a big hole to get out of," he said Thursday of the 750,000 jobs Michigan lost from 2001 to 2010.

No more dithering by labor. No more dithering by Detroit's politicians.